A School in the Cloud?

I’ve been into education and learning these past months, and going through some online courses, I find the subject more and more fascinating. Not only how we learn, how children learn, and how schools are not necessarily helpful in facilitating learning. So of course, coming across this TED talk by Sugata Mitra titled “Build a School in the Cloud”, my learning senses tingled.

Sugata Mitra at TED

Sugata Mitra’s experiments with self-organized learning are insightful in how children can learn without a teacher explaining every single element, how children can teach each other and outperform your expectations. It’s a must watch for all educators, parents, everyone really. It is maybe not a surprise that Mitra won $1 million from TED to support his wish to build a school in the cloud. Watch the entire talk here:

However, we should always take everything critically. In her blog Hacking Education, Audrey Watters reminds us how we all tend to take TED talks as inspiring and final, and not to interrupt. Yet I highly recommend that you go ahead and read her questions to Sugata Mitra’s talk here. Watters takes Mitra’s TED talk and a upcoming book by Dale Stephens and explores these two possible futures of education.